Surface-level, chick-lit–style memoir about the life of an English-language teacher in a small town in Iraq.
Like many Americans, Berg was laid off during the recession. When a former friend, Warren, offered her a job as a foreign-language teacher in Iraq, she accepted, realizing that she could eliminate her $40,000 credit-card debt while earning an $80,000 tax-free salary. Moving to another country would also give her a shot at finding her soul mate. Early on readers will learn about the author’s obsession with shoes, and eventually the extensive talk about footwear becomes tiresome and irrelevant, as does Berg’s frequent references to Scarlett O’Hara. Life in Erbil, a sleepy town with limited entertainment options, was difficult. Even though the author tried a few local restaurants and shops, she was most happy when drinking Diet Coke and shopping for luxury shoes online. Berg constantly fought to preserve her privacy in her company villa, which was often threatened by visits of higher-ups who needed a place to stay for the night when doing business in Erbil. The author eventually found some happiness when she fell for one of her students, an attractive boy 15 years her junior. However, she became suspicious of his motives when she learned that he wanted to move to America and needed someone to sponsor him. Eventually her employer fell on hard times and Berg was laid off. Around the same time she had the revelation that the only things she liked about Iraq were those that reminded her of the United States. Even though she earned the praise of her students and Warren, the author’s constant discussion of luxury goods overshadows any insights about her work as a teacher. There are a few funny stories and cultural observations (her discovery of virginity soap in the market), and her plan to repay her debt succeeded, but the shallow narrative could have used more pertinent observations about Iraq. More about the experience of a single professional American woman than about what life in Iraq has to offer an expat. Not recommended.
Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4022-6579-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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